You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
The latest book by the author of mash-up hit Pride and Prejudice and Zombies will launch Corsair, Constable & Robinson’s new fiction imprint from former Harvill Secker associate editor James Gurbutt.
He said the imprint has been named Corsair “to indicate free spirit” and because Constable was “an indie battling it out in corporate seas”. He said: “It’s more the spirit of independence we wish to convey than piracy in the literal sense.”
Corsair will publish one title a month in its first year and launches with Seth Graham-Smith’s latest offering: Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. The book was bought from Cathryn Summerhayes on behalf of Claudia Ballard at William Morris Endeavor Entertainment.
Corsair will publish in April 2010 along with the US publisher, Grand Central. “The first draft is in, and it’s very, very funny,” said Gurbutt.
The launch book will be followed in May by Pictures of Lily, a second adult novel from Matthew Yorke, who won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 20 years ago for his début, The March Fence.
Gurbutt bought the novel, told through the eyes of an adopted teenage girl keen to trace her birth parents, from Andrew Kidd at Aitken Alexander.
Next summer, Corsair will publish The Seas, a novel by Samantha Hunt, who has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize and has just been awarded the $30,000 Bard Fiction Prize in the US; and Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges, a “big American novel” about the super-rich which is garnering exceptional pre-publication praise.
Richard Ford has called The Privileges “verbally brilliant”, with Jonathan Franzen dubbing it “cunning, seductive” and “delicious page by page”. Random House will publish in the US. Gurbutt describes the book as “incredible”.
“American fiction is the hardest thing to do in the UK so the publisher really has to believe in it.”
Gurbutt joined Constable after his position as associate editor at Harvill Secker was one of those to go during Random House’s round of redundancies last spring.
At the time publisher Nick Robinson said: “We’ve been doing well with our crime fiction, handled by Krystyna Green, and we want to broaden our fiction offering and expand into other areas.”